


The Structure of the Hours Left Behind

by Gileonnen



Category: Doctor Strange (2016), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Afro-Romanian Karl Mordo, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Ways for Mordo to Process Trauma, Beijing Street Food, Cab Drivers Evangelizing for Shakira, Family Drama in Romania, Gen, Handholding, Leaving Stephen Strange on Read, M/M, The Endless Tedium of Travel, Tourists Seeking Enlightenment, Wizards with Smartphones, You Can't Go Home Again (But You Must)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-14
Updated: 2019-06-14
Packaged: 2020-05-02 09:03:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,469
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19195792
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Gileonnen/pseuds/Gileonnen
Summary: Betrayed and adrift after discovering the Ancient One's use of dark magics, Karl Mordo leaves Kamar-Taj and the Masters of the Mystic Arts to seek a new purpose. However, he discovers as he travels that he has left much of his own past unaddressed.





	The Structure of the Hours Left Behind

**Author's Note:**

  * For [28ghosts](https://archiveofourown.org/users/28ghosts/gifts).



> I have incorporated some of Baron Mordo's comicsverse past within this story; however, the Romania of our recent past does not map well onto what was recent past when the character was created. Thus, I have felt free to discard whatever I found ill-fitting for the story I wanted to tell. I have taken a similar approach to the realities of world travel.

When Karl Mordo left Kamar-Taj for the last time, dawn hadn't yet broken. The sky was still a deep indigo that faded to red over the city; there was too much smog for stars.

A cool breeze tugged at the ends of his scarf and the straps of his backpack. It stung his cheeks, but he turned his face into the wind and inhaled deeply. The smells of Kathmandu filled his nose: diesel exhaust and ash, sweet malpura and gwaramari frying in oil. Flowers from some distant field or temple. The sweet rot smell of trash, and the promise of rain.

It still smelled like home.

A part of him wanted someone to stop him. He wanted Stephen to challenge him with loopholes and logic and ethical quandaries; he wanted Wong to promise to destroy their most dangerous books, or Hamir to remind him of magic's hard-won lessons. He had dedicated too much of his life to the mystic arts to abandon them without a fight.

He wanted the Ancient One to step through a fissure in reality with her knowing eyes and her grim little smile and ask him what her betrayal had taught him.

He closed his eyes for just a moment, listening to the early morning traffic and the murmur of distant radios. A dog barked, and someone shouted. A pan fell with a long, rolling clang. All around him, a million lives unfolded into uncountable possibilities, and his heart clenched up like a fist with love for them.

Last time he had left a home behind, there had been nothing left for him there but ghosts to avenge and enemies to be revenged upon. He didn't know how to take his leave of a place that he still loved.

He opened his eyes again. The rising sun painted a band of gold at the horizon.

No one came to stop him, so he heaved his backpack up on his shoulder and began to walk.

* * *

He took a bus across the border, Nepal to Tibet, Kathmandu to Lhasa. No particular reason to choose Lhasa; there was a tour bus departing around the time he arrived at the station, and they had room for him and were willing to take his money. Lhasa was as good as any other place.

His documents were out of date, but the border guards barely glanced at them long enough to confirm that he had a travel permit and visa and that his photo matched his Romanian passport. It had been burgundy even before Romania joined the EU; maybe that helped. _Probably a lot of Europeans searching for themselves in the East,_ he thought to himself as they closed the little booklet and handed it back.

There had been a time when he'd scorned people like that. People who didn't understand who they were and what they wanted--rich folk huddling in Everest base camps, streaming into Buddhist temples older than their own countries, looking for enlightenment as though it was a souvenir they could find in a quaint little shop and take home to show their friends.

In those days, he'd thought he knew where he belonged. The infinite, fractal universes had unfolded before him, and at their core was a simple and incontrovertible truth: that there were natural laws, and that it was his duty to defend them. His soul had hearkened to that charge as though he'd heard his name called across a crowded room. It had felt more than natural. It had felt _right._

Now, Karl supposed that he was no better than the tourists.

He curled against the window of the bus, watching mountains slide past. The landscape here was barren, all shattered rocks and thin traceries of snow beneath a piercingly white sun. The mountains rose in grey peaks to the high, pale sky.

His fingertips circled the edges of his sling ring. _If you wanted to, you could be in Lhasa already,_ he thought to himself. _Hong Kong. New York. Heidelberg. Caracas. Johannesburg. Distance is a perception of the mind, not a property of the world. And like all things perceived, it can be reshaped._

She had taught him that. One of those "natural laws" that bent back on itself, that peeled open the laws of classical mechanics and sheared away from the observable. Uncertain in the quantum sense; the sorcerer became a being of pure velocity, passing through the whirling universe without a point of anchor.

He longed so desperately to hold still long enough to take the measure of where he was.

The engine groaned as the bus began to climb. The rocky landscape dropped away below them, with its knots of scrub and its shining silver lakes. Karl slid the ring off of his fingers, turning it over and over in his hands.

His journey had brought him here. To this between-place on the border between two countries, this bus rocking and swaying up the mountainside. Perhaps that was the lesson he'd come here to learn: how to honor the act of passing through.

How to set aside the infinite worlds that she had shown him, and instead to live in this one.

The bus stopped now and then, once they'd crossed the border. Tashi Lhunpo Monastery, with its elaborate painted walls and its hillsides studded with flowers. A monastery that some called "Palcho" and others called "Pelkor," where golden prayer wheels spun mantras at a touch. A few scruffy trees stood before its walls, casting a filigree of shade on the paving stones.

Karl sat beneath a tree and rested his head against its slender trunk, letting the shadows wash over his lap. He should meditate, he thought. Pray. Take photos of the red walls climbing the steeps behind the white and gold wedding-cake confection of the monastery. There was a raw-edged beauty to the temple grounds that awakened the heart. Someone had made this place to inspire contemplation.

Kamar-Taj had been the same.

He tilted his head back to watch the leaves move in the wind. Tried to feel the wind scouring his cheeks, chapping his hands, chilling the exposed skin over his shirt collar. Let his attention settle on this sun-warmed brick, that glittering rock, that dried petal rattling across the paving stones. Drank in the sunlight as though it were sweet wine.

It was beautiful, but its beauty didn't satisfy him. He wanted it to _mean_ something; he wanted to use this moment like a divining rod to find where he should be. It seemed so vain and pointless to exist here, in this place and this moment, unless it was to guide him toward some greater purpose. The puzzle of the universe ought to have pivoted around this point, and its countless gears and spokes ought to have reconfigured themselves into something strange and new. He so desperately craved a purpose.

 _Power requires purpose._ The thought drifted across his consciousness, so bright and clear that it had almost the force of a revelation. For an instant, he felt the broken edges of his philosophy align, and all of the seams and cracks vanished. His throat was tight with longing. _If it could only be that easy._

But the more he sought to pin down that thought, the harder it became to hold. _Power finds its own purpose,_ he thought. _Those who would wield it will devise a cause, and they will bend the world around it as surely as any hero would._

He hadn't found an answer by the time the tour guides came back. His cheeks were cold, and the shadows had grown long on the hillsides.

* * *

Karl must have dozed off on the last leg of the trip to Lhasa, because he woke to the chime of his phone. The evening had drawn down, painting the sky in rust and indigo, and only reading lights illuminated the back of the bus. His battery was low; it was the first time since he'd bought a phone that he hadn't replenished the charge with magic. He wasn't even sure he owned a charger.

He had four messages awaiting him, all from Stephen Strange. He was reasonably certain he'd never given Stephen his number, but that was a trivial matter for a sorcerer of Stephen's caliber. He could have sent a message across star systems, dimensions, parallel realities lying a whisper apart; he could have written his will into the very atoms of Karl's being. Finding a cell phone was child's play.

_not to rush your journey of self-discovery but we have work to do_

_we're short on sorcerers and there are forces beyond this world that we're only beginning to umbrella_

_*understand_

_autocorrect_

Karl couldn't help smiling, small and private but genuine. _Stephen Strange,_ he thought. _Sorcerer Supreme, master of the mystic arts. You unravel the fabric of the universe a little, seek out a vanished sorcerer across continents and send a message dancing from satellite to satellite until it finds me--and somehow the one word you can't manage to find is "understand."_

He thumbed out of the message app and tucked the phone away. A moment later, it buzzed again.

_I can see that you read my message_

_say something_

_at least tell me whether you're coming back_

A long pause. Three dots flickered in a speech bubble; Karl watched as Stephen gathered his thoughts, assembled them, and then dissolved them again. The dim white light of the screen picked out the curve of Karl's thumb, the arc of his index finger, the hard metal edge of his sling ring. He didn't know how to begin to answer.

_anyway_

_take as long as you need._

A moment later, the screen dimmed, then went black. Karl touched the power button, but the phone was dead. He'd have to buy a charger at the Lhasa airport.

Until that thought crossed his mind, he hadn't realized that he was planning to leave Lhasa as soon as he arrived--but once he realized it, he knew it to be true. Beneath his breastbone burned an old, familiar restlessness that he recognized now as the quest for purpose. It had spurred him on to Kamar-Taj in the ugliest days of his life, to chase down secrets and train his body until that fire inside nearly consumed him.

In those days, too, he'd thought he knew the righteous path: avenge his father's death. Destroy those who had murdered him. Escape the shame and betrayal that had become his only legacy.

He had never gone back to Vârf Mândră after he left it. He'd always meant to return in triumph, wielding flame and shadow as he opened the gates to a realm of demons. He'd meant to raze the place to the ground.

She'd taught him that he had a higher charge. When he longed for the means to destroy, she'd instead given him something to defend--and when his rage had stood between him and that calling, he had put that rage aside.

Perhaps it was finally time to return to Vârf Mândră again.

* * *

The next few days spooled on forever: catnaps in the airport terminal at Gonggar, sprawled out across four plastic seats with thin red cushions that stuck to his face. Changing rupees for yuan. The long flight to Beijing with the sunset at his back; a stopover in Chengdu, beneath the high glass and metal arch of the terminal ceiling. Beijing at night with her streets like rivers of gold; the glitter of the windows on her high-rise towers.

Updating his passport at the embassy-- _Where have you been for the last decade and a half?_ they asked, and what could he say but _Studying mysticism at a remote monastery_? They asked whether anyone could confirm his whereabouts for all of that time, and for a gutting moment, he thought, _No one left alive._

He gave them Wong's number. He would've given them Stephen's, but the phone display dissolved into tessellating glitches whenever he tried to bring it up.

The clerical staff gave him a queer look as he locked his phone again. And well they should, he supposed. With his antique title and his brown skin, his pre-EU documents and his smartphone, he must have looked to these middle-aged civil servants like some sort of Frankenstein's monster--an uncanny patchwork of dead and living things that didn't quite add up to someone they could recognize.

Between the jetlag, the lack of sleep, and the airport food, he wasn't sure he recognized himself, either.

 _You could just rip a hole in reality and be back in Vârf Mândră. No flights, no passports,_ he reminded himself. The sling ring was heavy on his hand. _You've chosen not to. This is what that choice means. You don't uphold natural law by setting yourself above human law._

Whatever he'd shown them must have been enough, because they promised to expedite his renewal.

He paid for a hotel room overlooking the city, where he could take a long, hot shower and watch the evening lights come on. He thought about texting Stephen back, but he still didn't have the first idea what he would say. In the end, he just left his phone charging on the desk and went to gaze out the window. One of the greatest cities in the world sprawled out before him, an ocean of light and glass and steel.

 _Live in this world,_ he told himself as he stood with his hand curled against the window glass. _Stop holding yourself apart from it._

Down the elevator to the streets, where restaurants stood open to the hot night air. The smells overwhelmed him, fish and peppers and duck fat and garlic all blended together. His mouth watered. He bought a pork bun still so hot that steam rose into the air when he bit into it, and then he spent the next five minutes fanning it until it was cool enough to eat. Neon signs blinked red and blue and yellow. Televisions played football games, dramas, commercials for face cream; people sat knocking back Yanjing beer and chatting about the weather.

The city teemed with life. Everywhere he looked, there were people toasting a promotion, frying crayfish, forcing a bicycle through crowded streets. He felt the great heaving thrum of their presence all around him. It required no mystic arts to see their lives intersecting, parting, and coming together again in arcs too complex for mathematics to describe.

This was the surface world that he had scorned in his quest for deeper mysteries. This was an ordinary night: the taste of pork and the sound of strangers' triumphs, the layered tumult of a million stories being told all at once. Each one shallow on its own, perhaps, but they accreted like silt beneath the sea. He could spend a lifetime cataloguing the glimpses of others' lives he'd had tonight, and he would die with the work still unfinished.

"If you wanted to go out for Chinese, you could've said."

Karl looked up from his bun. In a nearby alleyway, the last crackling sparks of a dimensional gateway faded; for an instant, a wind from beyond stirred Stephen's long cloak. Karl raised his brows. "I would call this an unexpected surprise, but I know you too well for that."

Stephen raised a bun to his lips and bit down with relish; Karl was absolutely certain he hadn't been holding it before. "You weren't answering your phone."

"You told me to take as long as I needed."

"I thought you'd take a few days, then get over it." Two more bites finished off the bun, and then he licked his fingers clean.

 _So you wanted me to take as long as_ you _needed,_ Karl thought, but it wouldn't help anything to voice that thought, so he kept it to himself. Instead, he said gently, "Some of us have more to get over than you do. The Ancient One taught me a sorcerer's way of looking at the world. It will take time for me to unlearn it."

"Why unlearn it?" Stephen demanded. He took a step closer, into the arc of Karl's space. There were new silver hairs at his temples; the neon lights washed them a shining blue. His eyes were very bright. Karl couldn't make himself look away. "There are threats greater than Kaecilius. Threads of chance that defy prediction. The deaths of worlds. The foreclosure of possibilities. We need our greatest sorcerers to defend us, and you're one of our greatest."

"I was," Karl answered. "But this is the trouble with greatness--power creates a purpose to justify the continued exercise of power. I want no further part in that, my friend. This world has too many sorcerers. I no longer count myself among them."

"I'd _love_ to hear what good you think that will do," said Stephen. There was a hard edge to his voice. "Do you think evil will do the same? Just set their power aside for fear of what they might justify to keep it? This isn't a theoretical scenario, Karl. We just shunted a demon back to the Dark Dimension--"

"The same Dark Dimension from which the Ancient One drew her power," snapped Karl. "You're right. This isn't theoretical. Kaecilius was one of her disciples, once. How many of her other disciples can do what they did? How many of us would find a reason to do so, when faced with death or defeat? We carry the seeds of our own destruction in us, and every time we twist reality, that weed takes root. I will have no part in that."

"Then help me teach people some reasonable boundaries."

"Boundaries!" Karl threw up his hands. "You used magic to find my number so that you could text me. You followed me to Beijing when I didn't answer you fast enough. What do you know about boundaries?"

The collar of Stephen's cloak bent in a little, like a wince. He glanced down, then exhaled in one long breath and stepped back and out of Karl's space. "Clearly not enough."

"Clearly."

"I'm sorry. This is your decision, and I'll try to respect it." Every sentence sounded strained, as though they were lines that Stephen had rehearsed for a play in which he didn't particularly want to be performing.

The gesture was thoughtful, even if the execution could use work.

After a moment, Karl laid a hand on Stephen's shoulder. "I meant what I said. I do still consider you my friend. And I am glad to see you."

Stephen's lips quirked. "Even though I'm a sorcerer."

That smile was infectious. Karl couldn't help grinning back. "And you still have a lot to learn about boundaries."

"Right." Stephen looked away. Around them, the city wheeled on. Beer bottles beaded with condensation; distant car horns sounded. An unexpected goal brought a cheering crowd in a bar to their feet. "What do you expect the rest of us to do? Burn our books, break our relics, and forget that we've ever seen other universes? Is that what you plan to do?"

"I don't know yet what I'll do," said Karl. It was the easiest question to answer. "When my life fell apart, I rebuilt it on the foundation of the Ancient One's teachings. To question her is to question everything. But I do know this: she taught me that to travel the multiverse meant to look beyond the world in front of me. And I think this is the fundamental misconception that we learned, as we mastered the mystic arts. The world in front of us is the world where the work of living is done. We look beyond it at our peril."

He let his hand fall to his side. Stephen tracked it with his gaze, as though he wanted that hand on his shoulder again. As though that gesture might close some unending loop and return them to each other.

Their friendship had been a room in the house built on the Ancient One's foundations. No arcane art could recover it as it once had been. Just as with everything else, they would have to build anew.

"Go ahead, then," said Stephen eventually. "Do your Eat, Pray, Love thing, if it helps you find clarity. Take your time. But there's still a place for you with us. And I think ... I think we need voices like yours to keep us on the path."

He said it as though he still believed that there was a path. Karl envied that certainty.

"Well," said Karl. "Since you're here, let's see the city. I, for one, am starving."

"No magic." It was an offer, or a promise.

"No magic," Karl agreed.

Stephen grinned and offered his arm. With his cloak streaming out behind him, he looked every inch the dashing rogue from some period romance. Karl laughed and hooked his hand over Stephen's elbow, and together, they stepped out onto the street.

Walking the streets was different, with Stephen beside him. He found himself getting lost in their conversations, retracing old arguments about the properties of relics or creative uses for the Mirror Dimension. Now and then, he would touch Stephen's hand and draw his attention to some clever wordplay in a restaurant sign or an interesting delicacy--starfish, scorpions, shining red tanghulu candied in sugar. They pulled close to each other when a bicycle passed, then never managed to pull themselves apart again. The street was loud, and Stephen was making a complex and misguided point about time and causality, and Karl wanted to hear him.

With Stephen at his side, the world felt like a place he was inhabiting again, and not like a relic he was unearthing. He liked that feeling.

"Is this a date?" Stephen asked, when they'd been walking arm in arm for what must have been an hour. "Are we on a date?"

Karl raised his brows. "Do you want to be?"

Stephen had a way of shrugging with his mouth that expressed a whole host of emotions. "Yes. No. I don't know. This is new ground for me, actually. Still feeling it out."

But he hadn't let go of Karl's arm, and that was a kind of answer.

"Everything is new ground, for us," said Karl softly. "You don't have to decide this moment. Take your time."

"Okay, I see now how patronizing that sounds."

"A bit," Karl laughed. "But I understood that it was well meant."

Slowly, Stephen's hand slid down Karl's arm. His knuckles grazed Karl's palm; his fingers trembled. For a moment, Karl was sure that he would pull away. _Always so proud of his broken hands._

Then their fingers linked together, warm and sure. "So about the Golden Bowl of Manawydan," said Stephen. "Wong alluded to some issues with the provenance--"

"It wasn't a true relic," Karl supplied immediately. "Only an object with a spell cast on it."

Stephen blinked. "There's a difference."

"Of course there's a difference," said Karl--and they picked up the thread of their conversation again, as though nothing at all had changed.

* * *

It was two weeks before Karl's new passport came through, which (the embassy assured him) was unusually quick. By then, he had made friends with the concierge at his hotel, walked every pathway in the Botanical Gardens, and discovered the best fried crayfish in all Beijing. He was almost reluctant to leave. But his ready money was beginning to run out, and so he bid farewell to the city that had begun to capture his heart.

Then onto a plane again, and then another plane. Beijing to Istanbul, Istanbul to Bucharest. Flights across the Atlas Mountains, the Caucasus Mountains, the Balkans--and at last, at long last, the rough green Carpathians of home.

He found an amiable cab driver who didn't mind the four-hour round trip--had a cousin, actually, who lived in Vârf Mândră, and did Karl know a Sorina Maria Deleanu? She owned a little bed and breakfast off the main street, with a shop attached where she sold crystals and old-country charms. She might have been Sorina Maria Pippidi when he knew her, if he knew her, but then of course she met Florin, and--

"Sorina Maria," said Karl, tasting its consonants. Romanian no longer came easily to his tongue, but something in the music of that name recalled the language of his youth. "I don't think I know her, but I'd like to."

He paid up front and settled into the back of the cab, listening to the quiet strains of an old Shakira CD playing over the speakers. By now, his wallet was alarmingly light. He'd managed to forget how expensive it was to exist in the world; travel and lodging, food and drink all took their toll. To survive on little meant to shrink the compass of one's world to what one could afford--never to see the Himalayas under the high noon sun, or to stroll the streets of Beijing, or to buy phuchka from a Kathmandu vendor and eat it with sour chili water so hot that it made your eyes run. Never to taste the air at three miles up, and to feel your head light and your chest tight with the strain of it.

Money was only another kind of power, no less seductive than sorcery. The tourists on the road to Lhasa had understood that, he thought, although perhaps they tried not to. Money widened the scope of the world for those select few who could access it, granting them access to the sublime.

 _Less than an hour back in Romania, and you're already turning communist,_ Karl chided himself as the cab pulled away from the airport.

But Romania had shed her Soviet ties before Karl was out of school, and his father had slowly begun to consolidate the dozens of secret caches and family bank accounts that had lain dormant since before the forties. The old village hedge-wizards and scholars of mysticism had slowly emerged from beneath the Iron Curtain, and Nikolai Mordo had had them to his house along with physicists and historians and learned strangers from every part of the globe. He'd wanted to cultivate a love of learning in his son that he would carry throughout his life. No path to knowledge was forbidden, no secrets set out of bounds--none but the secrets of Karl's own heart, which he learned early on not to share. He had grown up understanding that he had a duty to the family that surpassed his duties to himself.

Nikolai had dreamed of greatness for himself and his descendants, and then his daughter had murdered him.

 _Wherever, whenever--we're meant to be together,_ Shakira crooned as the forested hillsides slid past. These were the old, wild woods where Karl had played as a boy, poplars and silver firs and thick grey alders blotting out the sun. "You like Shakira?" the cab driver asked. "I have her new album, too, if you want."

"I've never really listened before," he said, which was true.

"You've never heard of Shakira!" the cab driver cried, which wasn't true at all--but for the next hour, he regaled Karl with tales of her album releases and her concerts and that one electric moment when he'd won tickets to a show in 2011. His enthusiasm was so infectious that Karl didn't have the heart to interrupt.

The roads slowly became familiar again. He began to recognize landmarks from his youth at the roadsides: villages that had survived the rise and fall of communism, abandoned churches that had cracked to their foundations in the earthquake of 1838. A Soviet-era factory of concrete and steel, incongruous among cottages that had outlived nations.

The tumbledown spires of Castle Mordo upon an otherwise unremarkable hill. Before his death, Karl's father had talked of restoring that old fastness to its ancient glory; afterward, neither Karl nor his mother had been able to stomach the work. She had retreated to Germany to nurse her grief, and he had thrown himself into the arts of destruction.

When he saw those crumbling stones, an old rage rose in him that he had thought long extinguished. It wasn't fair that there should be no sanctuary left for him on this green earth. It wasn't fair that he had wasted so many years on seeking vengeance, or that vengeance had colored all he'd learned in Kamar-Taj. His hands clenched in his lap so tightly that the sling ring dug into his skin.

He forced himself to breathe. "You can let me off at the castle," he told the driver.

"Are you sure? It's a long walk from there to town--"

There was steel in his voice, and he couldn't make it gentle. "I'm sure."

"Suit yourself."

The road up to the gate had long since washed out, so the driver let him off at the foot of the hill. "Just a moment," the driver said as Karl stepped out of the car. He rummaged around in the glove compartment, then pulled something out and held it out the window. "Here. Take this. Never too late to start listening."

When he saw what it was, Karl couldn't hold in a startled laugh. The driver was offering him a CD in a jewel case, with a familiar name on the cover.

 _Never too late to start listening,_ he told himself. It resonated in him like the toll of a bell, and some long-held tension eased at the sound of it. Aloud, he said, "Thank you."

Then, tucking the CD into his backpack, he began to climb the hill.

He had never seen Castle Mordo as anything but a ruin. When he'd been a child, he'd played in the empty shells of its towers and patrolled its walls with a stick over his shoulder. Other children had shunned and teased him--his father called it jealousy; his mother called it racism--and so he'd retreated into his imagination to fight enemies of his own devising. _You never did develop the art of living in the world, did you,_ he thought to himself wryly.

He leapt across the broken bridge and stepped beneath the arch of the outer wall. The great door hung from its hinges, a wreck of wood and iron; he squeezed past it and into the gatehouse.

Swallows nested in the rafters, and mice scattered at the sound of his footfalls. In one corner, where moss had consumed an ancient bucket, a pair of orange and white kittens peered up at him. When he knelt, they came tumbling across the floor toward him with insistent, beeping cries.

He folded his legs and settled his hands on his knees. The kittens, met with no rebuff, clambered up his thighs and settled into his lap. He offered them his fingers to sniff, and they nudged him to demand scratches.

He let them. He let the swallows perch and flutter and the mice go about their secret business in the weeds. When the wind sighed through the collapsed roof, he listened to its music and let his rage ebb into grief.

The Ancient One had betrayed him, just as his half-sister had betrayed his family so many years ago. Even if they could have told him why, he didn't think there was an answer that could satisfy him. He hadn't come to Vârf Mândră seeking answers.

A part of him longed to tear stone from stone so that nothing remained of Castle Mordo. At least, then, it might have felt as though he could leave it behind. Another part of him longed to grasp the skein of reality and twitch the threads until the castle stood whole again.

But there were swallows in the rafters now, and kittens growing into cats, and wildflowers and young trees making a garden of the courtyard. These ruins had become their home. The thought of defending their place brought him peace, as destruction or creation could not.

The Ancient One had taught him that, and try though he might, he could not reject that lesson.

He hiked back to Vârf Mândră near sunset, when the wind's edge turned cold. He found Sorina Maria Deleanu's bed and breakfast off the main street and booked a room, and they laughed together at her cousin's gift to him.

In the privacy of his room, he plugged in his phone and thumbed over to the message app.

 _I need a little longer,_ he told Stephen, and trusted that the message would carom from satellite to satellite until it found him. _But I will come back._

The ellipse flickered at the bottom of the screen for a long moment. Karl could feel Stephen weighing answers.

At last, though, he said only, _Take as long as you need._

**Author's Note:**

> The title comes from Sarah Arvio's "[Flying](https://poets.org/poem/flying)."


End file.
